What happens when adults catch teenagers "sexting" photos of
each other? The death of common sense.

On a chilly Tuesday morning in November 2007, 16-year-old Alex
Davis was taking a shower before school when his mother, Betty,
knocked on the bathroom door. There was someone downstairs, she
said, a New York state trooper who had come at 7 a.m. to the
family’s farm outside Rochester.

“She said, ‘I think it’s about Laurie,’ ” Alex recalls. “My
stomach kind of dropped, and I thought, ‘This is not going to be
good.’ ”

The previous Friday, after coming home from football practice
with a few teammates, Alex had exchanged text messages with Laurie,
a 14-year-old freshman (whose name has been changed in this story,
as has Alex’s and his family’s). While his friends played
Guitar Hero on his PS2, Alex, captain of the football,
basketball, and tennis teams, read a message from Laurie saying she
wanted to be a cheerleader.

“I said, well, I needed a cute cheerleader this year,” recalls
Alex, a deep-voiced kid with an open face, dark eyes, and the
synaptic quickness of a natural athlete. “And she said, ‘Oh, yeah?
Well, is this cute?’ And then…”

And then Alex made what he now calls “that little two-second
decision to mess up my whole life.” He opened photos Laurie took of
herself with her cell-phone, in her bra and panties, and then just
her panties. Alex texted back, asking for more and noting that the
reception on his Verizon LG phone was crap. No problem, Laurie
replied. She would send the photos to his email address. They soon
arrived along with a bonus attachment: a video clip of Laurie
performing a striptease. Alex was happy to receive the images and
says Laurie seemed happy to send them, “like she was willing and
she wanted to show more, I guess.” That might have been the end of
it, had the files not, as digital files will, leaked onto the
Internet. Within a day after Alex saw them, so did Laurie’s mother,
who phoned Betty to say, “You need to talk to your son.”

So Betty and her husband Bill sat Alex on the stump that serves
as a stool before the hearth of the home where three generations of
Betty’s family have lived and asked Alex, a leader of their church
youth group and recipient of several good citizen awards, what had
happened. Alex told them. He said he was sorry and wanted to
apologize. Betty called Laurie’s mother, who told her that an
apology would be insufficient. Alex texted Laurie to ask what was
going on. She answered that her father really wanted “to lay down
the law.”

And now the law stood at Alex’s front door, asking on behalf of
the Genesee County Sheriff ’s Department how the pictures came to
be distributed. Alex explained that he had left the email inbox
open on his Dell desktop. His buddy had forwarded the images to his
own address. (According to Alex, he hadn’t shown the photos to
anyone or posted them to his MySpace or Facebook pages, so he
assumed this was how they made their way onto the Net. Later he
would learn he was one of four boys who had received snapshots from
Laurie and from whose computers the images had, like mononucleosis,
spread exponentially.)

The trooper printed Alex’s statement on a printer he’d brought
with him and watched while Alex signed it. Charges, he said, were
pending.

Peer-to-Peer Flashing

Not far from the Davis farm stands the George Eastman House, a
Versailles-size mansion in downtown Rochester that includes
displays of the Eastman Kodak Company’s myriad photographic
inventions, including the Brownie camera. Released in 1900,
Brownies were designed for youngsters and marketed with the slogan,
“So simple, they can easily be operated by any school boy or girl.”
Pictorial ads of the time show young folks preserving memories of
outdoor games and train rides.

Eastman likely never imagined that young people, empowered not
only with cameras but mobile wireless network nodes, would instead
shoot naked pictures of themselves and send them to friends, who
often return the favor. We’re not talking about a few
exhibitionistic teens, but millions of kids. In a 2008 TRU survey
of 1,280 teenagers and young adults (all of whom had volunteered to
participate), 20 percent of the teenagers and 33 percent of the
young adults said they had transmitted nude or semi-nude photos or
videos of themselves, a phenomenon the media have dubbed
“peer-to-peer porn” or “sexting.”

This practice might be considered relatively harmless, the
21st-century version of “you show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” if
it weren’t for federal and state laws that deal harshly with those
who traffic in child pornography. The federal statute criminalizes
the production, distribution, and possession of images depicting
underage subjects engaged in sexually explicit conduct; depending
on the charges, it mandates sentences of five to 30 years in
prison. Because the technology that allows sexting is new,
age-appropriate punishments have yet to be hammered out. Instead,
laws designed to thwart middle-aged people who prey on children are
being applied to the children themselves.

Sexting cases are piling up in courtrooms across the United
States. Three Pennsylvania girls, ages 14 and 15, who took
semi-nude pictures of themselves with their phones and sent them to
their boyfriends are awaiting trial on charges of distributing
child porn. (The boyfriends are charged with possession.) Last
October a 15-year-old Ohio girl was taken in handcuffs to a
juvenile detention facility after sending nude photos of herself to
classmates. “I wasn’t really thinking when I did it,” she told the
court, which threatened felony charges that would require her to
register as a sex offender, charges that were dropped when she
agreed to have her cell phone and Internet use monitored. Two
teenagers in Florida were not as fortunate: In 2007 a state appeals
court upheld their convictions for producing child porn. Although
the pair didn’t pass around the snapshots, which showed them
engaged in an “unspecified sex act,” the judges found a “reasonable
expectation that the material will ultimately be disseminated.”
Were that to happen, they observed, “future damage may be done to
these minors’ careers or personal lives.” They did not say anything
about the potential impact on their lives from a child pornography
conviction.

Alex’s case isn’t even the first to arise in his part of the
country. Genesee County, with a population of about 60,000, has
seen “a dozen, 15 maybe” in the last two years, according to
Assistant District Attorney Will Zickl. “I’m glad they didn’t have
this technology when I was in high school,” he says. “Once you put
your image out there, it’s out there. God knows where it can go. As
computer-savvy and Net-savvy as kids are, they don’t think about
that.”

Or maybe they do, and they just don’t care. While it’s hard to
argue that it’s an awesome idea for teenagers to launch pictures of
their genitals into cyberspace, the sheer number who do so suggests
that they don’t share the concern for privacy that held sway over
previous generations. When they close their bedroom doors, it is
not necessarily to be alone. It might be to hook up with the whole
world.

Better Than We Thought

The call that Tom Splain took from Betty and Bill Davis was not
the first the attorney had received about a kid caught looking at
dirty pictures. “At least in this case, the fricking sheriff didn’t
send out a press release,” says Splain, a big man in a dress shirt
and tie. Between answering calls from several clients and a judge,
he relates an earlier incident in which an overzealous police chief
acted as though he had a big cyber-crime on his hands. The official
alerted a Rochester TV station, which splashed a mug shot of the
boy—bangs in his eyes, cheeks spackled with acne—all over the 6
p.m. news.

If there’s culpability on Alex’s part, Splain says, it’s that he
did what might be expected of a kid his age: He looked at the
photos and asked for more. “The thing to bear in mind,” Splain
adds, “is she sent him these pictures unsolicited. He’s [got]
hormones galore—hey, yeah, holy cow! It’s Christmas morning!”

Alex deleted the files as soon he realized his and Laurie’s
virtual encounter was about to have very real consequences,
consequences Splain knew could be extremely serious. “We’re talking
about C, D, and E-level felonies,” he says. “A C-level is a
mandatory minimum three and a half years in state prison and up to
15. In our system, Alex wasn’t a juvenile. He was a youthful
offender. If you’re 16 or older, you’re treated as an adult.” The
Davises could have agitated for a charge against Laurie of
disseminating indecent materials to minors in the second degree—a
class E felony—but they declined, and they have had no further
communications with her family.

(Contacted for this article, Laurie’s father would only say on
the record, “This country has laws in place to protect children.
Those laws need to be enforced, and parents need to pursue those
laws to the fullest extent to protect their children.”)

Adults who have been drawn into the drama of kids and their cell
phones tend to be caught between the desire to punish and the
reality that kids can flout conventional standards of decency,
morality, or what-have-you and still grow up to be productive
members of society. “Schools are really struggling at the policy
level, as are the courts, to establish a body of case law and
guiding legal principles for what is acceptable,” says Samuel
McQuade, graduate program coordinator at the Rochester Institute of
Technology’s Center for Multidisciplinary Studies. His 2008 Survey
of Internet and At-Risk Behaviors, which polled about 40,000
upstate New York students, charts the online intersections between
kids and sex, which are seemingly infinite. “The last thing we want
to do for youth is to clog up our juvenile justice systems with the
massive amounts of computer-enabled crime,” he says. “It’s not
possible to do it, nor would you want to do it. The answer is
through education.”

So far, that line of thinking has led to efforts of dubious
value—McGruff the Crime Dog for the digital set. McQuade’s own
organization, the Cyber Safety and Ethics Initiative, puts its
energy into hanging posters promoting “good digital citizenship,”
embedding ethical messages in school websites, and publishing a
pamphlet called It’s Worse Than We Thought. Actually, it’s
probably better. A recent study by Harvard’s Berkman Center for
Internet & Society suggests that the threats children face
online, in particular from sexual predators, are no worse than
those they encounter offline. This is in sync with other research,
including the 2007 Pew Internet and American Life Project, which
shows that when social networking, kids can tell a pervert from a
potential friend.

Meanwhile, law enforcement officials are learning that the
tough-guy approach can do more harm than good. Splain describes how
one local D.A. is handling cases. “He’s like, ‘I get a call almost
every day from the school resource counselor in Genesee [County],
saying they’ve intercepted another phone with these pictures,’ ”
Splain says. “They’ve taken the tack, we don’t want to hurt
anybody. We want the school resource officer to intercede and put
the fear of God in these kids. If there are further problems, let
us know, but word is going out to the parents that the school is
handling it internally.”

That isn’t what happened in Alex’s case. Three months after
receiving the pictures, Alex was arrested. Splain called Bill Davis
and asked him to bring his son to the station. There, the trooper
who had taken the initial report at the Davis house joined the
father and the attorney as Alex was being led away for
fingerprinting. Splain recalls: “The trooper said to me, ‘Tom, when
we were that age, we snuck a look at our dad’s Playboy and
passed it around. What do they expect?’ ”

The Death of Common Sense

It’s 4 p.m. on a Friday in January, and the Davis home is a
thoroughfare. Every five minutes, someone walks through the front
door: a young Chinese woman who lives with the Davises while she
spends the year teaching, several employees of the Davises’ large
farms. Betty pours a cola in the kitchen beneath a plaque on the
stove hood that reads, “Be still, and know that I am God,” before
joining her husband at the dining table.

“The reason we’re sitting here is we’re hoping we can help
somebody else through this,” says Bill, his overalls filled by a
stout belly. “The girl moved to our school that year; she had been
homeschooled up until then. Obviously, she was trying to fit in
somehow, and she sent a picture to my son, and he asked for more.”
He looks to Betty. “In our eyes, that’s fairly normal.”

Not that they were sanguine about it. “The last thing Alex wants
to do is disappoint us, and he knew at that point, he had,” Betty
says. “And the parents wanted some type of a punishment for the
embarrassment.”

“If I were in their shoes, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have done the
same thing,” Bill says, adding that, while he and Betty had never
met Laurie or her folks, “I’m sure they’re a great family.”

What might have been settled quickly between the families—with
apologies, or confiscation of cell phones, or a smack upside the
head and the words, “What’s wrong with you?”—instead became a
prolonged and anxiety-ridden ordeal. Bill and Betty worked
assiduously to contain the damage and did everything Splain, their
attorney, told them to do. They agreed to pay if Laurie needed
counseling, for instance, a recollection that causes Betty to widen
her eyes in incredulity. They took Alex to a sex counselor, a $350
meeting that ended with the counselor telling Betty what she
already knew: “There’s no sex problem with your son.”

Then there were the things they could not control, such as the
confiscation by police of the computer belonging to the dean of
students at Alex’s school. The dean had requested the images in an
effort to sort things out—but that made him a suspect, a turn of
events that enrages Bill to the point that he appears to levitate
in his chair. “They don’t make better people than this man,” he
says. “I was worried he’d lose his damn job! There’s the death of
common sense, is how I refer to it.”

And there was the ongoing specter of prosecution. The D.A. had
yet to press charges, but the worst-case scenario was three
felonies, including passing child pornography, which would require
Alex to register as a sex offender. “How can you go to college?”
asks Betty, the pitch of her voice rising as she recalls her fear
and umbrage. “How can you do anything with this on your
record?”

For several months, it looked as though it might all go away.
Then, in February, Splain called to say that Alex would be charged.
“The officer said I could bring [Alex] down at a time convenient
for both of us,” says Bill, his voice thickening with tears. “So I
waited for him after basketball practice, and we went there. We
walked in the door, and when I tried to go in with [my son], an
officer said, ‘No, you have to stay here.’ ”

Betty pats his hand. “Dad was scared,” she says.

“Yeah, Dad was scared,” he says. “Because Dad has common
sense.”

Betty says she put her faith in God and knew it was going to be
OK. Which, as these things go, it was: Alex was charged with
endangering the welfare of a child, a Class A misdemeanor that
doesn’t require serving time. If he stayed out of trouble for six
months, the record would be sealed.

Aftermath

The walls of Alex’s room are covered with posters: former
Dodgers pitcher Greg Maddux, eight-time NBA All Star Paul Pierce,
and a lone shot of Britney Spears. Alex is willing, in the bashful
way of a 17-year-old boy talking to a lady he doesn’t know, to
discuss what happened.

“I didn’t pressure her into it or anything,” he says. Not that
he didn’t appreciate the gesture or didn’t like the photos. “It was
all right,” he admits. “It was good.” As for the images themselves,
they were not shocking or unusual. His friends frequently show him
sexy pictures sent by female friends of theirs. Now, though, he has
a policy about looking. “I always ask my friends, how old is she?”
he says. “My rule is, 18.”

Around Alex, the supposition that kids who swap naked photos
shred social decency while laying waste to their own futures falls
apart. If there’s blame to be assigned, he’s ready to take it.
“It’s kind of like that for everything,” he says. “Like when I play
basketball. If we lose, it feels like I did what I had to do but I
still have most of the blame on me. I’ve learned to deal with
it.”

And he would have dealt with it, whether it meant going to jail
or delaying college (where he plans to study business
administration, with the goal of helping run his family’s farms) or
apologizing to Laurie’s parents. The latter doesn’t seem to be in
the cards. When they see him, it seems to Alex they avoid eye
contact, and he hasn’t been sure they want to hear anything from
him, including that he’s sorry. “But I think one of these days I
will apologize, just for how everything went down,” he says. “I
don’t want her family to think I’m that type of kid.”

Alex pauses, broad-shouldered and loose-limbed, wearing sweats
on a Saturday morning after winning the big game. While the photos
may have been a big deal to the grown-ups, to him and Laurie they
weren’t. “I mean, this is my senior year, and I just want to have
fun with it,” he says. “I see her. She’s a star cheerleader. We
don’t let it faze us.”

From his point of view, the problem wasn’t the pictures but the
aftermath. “This is a 16-year-old boy and an almost 15-year-old
girl going through their young adult lives here,” Alex says.

“I just wish the families could have handled it better. I mean,
I would have been glad to mow their lawn all summer.”

After which, maybe, she could have mowed the lawn at his
house.

Alex grins. “Exactly.”

Nancy
Rommelmann (nancyrommelmann@yahoo.com) writes for the L.A.
Weekly and other publications. She lives in Portland,
Oregon.